


it's been a while since we knew the way

by serenityfails



Series: there's gonna come a day when you feel better [2]
Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti)
Genre: Arachnid Funeral, Bike Is Real, Complicated Romantic Tension, Dreams and Nightmares, Flashbacks, Graphic Description of Corpses, Grieving, Guilt, M/M, Regular Funeral, Road Trips, Unresolved Sexual Tension, motel sex, two touchy-feely guys touching and feeling each other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-17
Updated: 2020-02-17
Packaged: 2021-02-27 23:35:19
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,801
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22764100
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/serenityfails/pseuds/serenityfails
Summary: Bill kisses Mike, then disappears from his life for twenty-four years.
Relationships: Bill Denbrough/Mike Hanlon
Series: there's gonna come a day when you feel better [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1636642
Comments: 16
Kudos: 62





	it's been a while since we knew the way

**Author's Note:**

> Not strictly necessary to have read [soul, I hear you calling](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21214631) if you don't feel like going through a gauntlet of pain to get to that BIKE CONTENT. Necessary context: Bill and Mike have been traveling together in the immediate aftermath of Pennywise 2.0, they just left a Losers Reunion at Ben's house where Mike kissed Bill, and everyone who is canonically dead is still dead.
> 
> I have shipped this since the miniseries. Bike is real. Bike is love. Bike is life. Here, [have a Bike playlist.](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7n2bxpn861eQzknvFElHd8?si=jf6rqilGTLuxE4Vw6rdFvg)
> 
> And a big thank you to [electricshoebox](https://archiveofourown.org/users/electricshoebox/pseuds/electricshoebox) for cheering and edits!
> 
> Title from "I Was a Lover" by TV on the Radio.

When Bill was sixteen, he ran away from home.

Given the fact that he was a relatively independent young man, old enough to hold a job stocking shelves and bagging groceries at the Shop 'n Save and not generally subject to the same scrutiny Donald and Andrea Uris showed their son, and, God forbid, nowhere near as highly policed as Sonia Kaspbrak's, his being gone late into the night might not have raised any alarm bells. But he and his parents had fought, and Bill had shouted at them as he'd run out the door, and when a night had passed and he still hadn't come home, his parents enlisted his friends to help find him.

Eddie was still out of town visiting with family, probably getting smothered to death by his mother's sisters, so he wasn't part of the search party, but Stan was in charge of looking around the cul-de-sacs of their neighborhood while Bill's parents drove at a turtle's pace around town. Richie had volunteered to head out towards the quarry, and Mike had suggested combing the Barrens. That was where Mike found him that morning, huddled in a dusty old blanket in the hammock of their clubhouse.

Bill had startled awake at the sound of Mike prying open the hatch, but when he saw who it was, he relaxed, and rolled himself to his feet. His limbs popped and his muscles groaned, displeased with his decision to sleep where he had.

"Hey, Mikey," he said. His voice was deep and rough with sleep.

"Hey, Bill," Mike said, just like any other day when they might have met up to hang out. "Your parents are looking for you."

Bill sighed, trudging over to lean against the wall and sink to the dirt floor, drawing the ratty, dust-coated blanket around his shoulders. Mike joined him, shoulder-to-shoulder in the faint trickle of morning light filtering in through the hatch.

"Please d— don't tell them where I am yet," Bill said, his fingers tightening in the blanket.

"Okay," Mike said. "Do you want me to leave?"

"N— no, you— you can stay. Just— let me hide for a little while? And then I promise I'll go home. I just—"

"Okay," Mike said. He sat in silence next to Bill for a while, steady and solid. Despite everything, it made Bill relax, the anxious knot in his stomach unwinding just a little bit. Lucky Seven had become Lucky Five, and right now it was only the Lucky Two of them, but it was better than being Unlucky One. Even the Lone Ranger needed a friend.

"Did they tell you what happened?" Bill asked, watching a dust mote float through the thin beams of cold light. It danced around in the close air, tossed around by Mike's breath through his nose, before it landed on the dirt-stained knee of his jeans. It was early for Bill, but probably not all that early for Mike, who had always been expected to be up and working before most of the rest of them were awake. He wondered if he'd be in trouble with his uncle for begging off to help find Bill. He hoped not.

"They said you had a fight, but that was it," Mike said. "They thought maybe you'd come to one of our houses, but you hadn't."

Bill sighed, burying his face against his arms. Why did he always have to fly off the handle? He'd made everything so much harder for everyone, the same way he always did, just by not thinking it through. "I'm so— sssorry, Mike."

But Mike didn't seem mad. "Was it bad?" Bill breathed heavily into the blanket, not wanting to answer, to give it truth by saying it out loud. The dusty wool blanket made him sneeze.

Bill was scared. He'd been scared before— bone-deep scared, danger-around-every-corner scared, facing-his-own-death-and-that-of-all-his-friends scared. He'd gotten pretty well acquainted with all the different shades and shapes "scared" could take. But this was different than the external kind of fear, where someone or something was after you. He'd learned by then that was the kind of fear you could fight. It was harder when the thing you were scared of was sitting firmly in your body.

"Do you think one day you'll f—forget about me?" Bill's voice was muffled against his arms. His stomach rolled angrily. He'd left home before dinnertime.

"Why the hell would I forget you?" Mike slung an arm around Bill's shoulders, over the blanket. "You're my best friend."

Something in Bill's chest fluttered, a little bubble of anxious pleasure. Bill considered all of them his best and closest friends, of course, and Mike among them, but hearing Mike name him like that, "best friend," _his_ best friend, felt like something different from that. Did Mike really think so much of him? He felt a little guilty, underneath the pride, that he hadn't thought to think of Mike in the same way.

But Ben had become one of his best and closest, too, and Ben hardly ever called or wrote anymore. And while he'd only closely known Bev for one summer (the most significant few months of his short life, which seemed to stretch for years beyond their end) he had thought… Bill didn't know what he'd thought. Maybe that when something was sealed in blood, it was supposed to last forever. He looked back on it now and thought, _You stupid little kid. What do you know about anything?_

He let Mike's warmth seep through the rough fibers of the blanket, into his shoulders, down his back. His scalp prickled. He just wanted to hit the pause button on his life, so he could stay in this moment before it was ruined by what he had to say.

"My parents are gonna try to sell the house," Bill said.

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. And… and they want us to m— m— mmm—" Bill's eyes screwed shut, his teeth clenching, and he beat his hands against his thighs. _"Fuck!"_

Mike's hand gripped his shoulder tighter. "You're moving?"

"My grandparents live in New York. Dad says we should be closer to— to our family." Bill breathed out hard through his nose, trying to keep his composure. "But I think he thinks if Mom can get out of Derry she can forget about— about everything, and just… that she'll be better, or something. He wants us to forget about it. Why would he _want_ that?"

"I don't know," Mike said. Bill knew he would agree with him. Even though what had happened to Mike's parents had been so terrible, and even though he had been so young, Bill knew he and his grandfather did everything they could to remember. Mike had scrapbooks full of tragedy on every page. Anyone else might have called it morbid and disturbing, and maybe it was, but he and Mike knew better than most people how important it was to document what you've been through, even the ugly things, just as a reminder that it was real. That the pain wasn't a dream. That the people you lost had been there, that they mattered.

Bill had every letter Bev and Ben ever sent tucked neatly into a set of folders in his desk drawer. When the letters stopped coming, it helped to have the reminder that once upon a time, something terrible had happened, but the seven of them had been unstoppable. Even if they forgot.

"When?"

"They want to be out before the end of summer. To cause 'as little disruption as possible'. Can you believe that? 'Disruption'. Jesus." Bill's head slumped against Mike's shoulder, and Mike pulled him in closer. "They can't _do_ this."

Bill could hear Mike breathing next to him, but he didn't speak again for a while. He just kept holding onto Bill, like if he held tightly enough, Bill wouldn't have to go.

"Nobody else knows yet?"

"No, I… you're the first. I'm sssorry. Shit, this s— _sucks."_

"Okay," Mike said. "Well, we don't have to tell anyone anything yet. They probably won't think you got kidnapped or murdered for another couple hours."

Bill laughed weakly, turning his head so that his nose pressed into Mike's collarbone. Mike smelled like dirt and fresh sweat, like he was the warm earth itself holding Bill right where he was. Mike's chin came to rest on the top of Bill's scalp, his breath stirring Bill's hair.

"This is Derry," Bill said. "If they were smart, that's the first thing they'd think."

"Well, Eddie's not here, so Stan's our only doomsayer until he gets back." Bill could feel Mike's lips move against him. "And I think he knows you can handle yourself."

"I'm not so sure."

"Hey." Mike's head pulled back, his fingers squeezing Bill's shoulder. "We won't forget about you. I won't let that happen. I couldn't."

"I don't—" Bill said, and turned his head to speak to Mike directly, but his breath caught in his throat when his nose bumped against Mike's. He hadn't realized they were so close. He should have jerked back. He couldn't, held steady as he was by Mike's long arm, his broad hand. Bill didn't have time to think that he didn't want to pull back, anyway, before he was rushing in headlong, just like he always did.

Mike's lips were soft and giving. It had been almost three years since his first kiss. He remembered hope, rising in his chest like carbonation, and the wet smear of the blood of their covenant against his cheek, and Bev's mouth pressed tightly to his, a desperate plea, _Don't forget me_. He didn't remember it being this soft and calm and enveloping. Bill felt like he could live here, if he had a mind to, gently pressed up into Mike, surrounded by him like a blanket, like a roof and four walls. Everything above ground was unforgiving fear and uncertainty. Down here, it was just him and Mike, and they were home, and nothing could be safer.

They stayed there for a while, letting the sun rise higher, letting the world pass by around them. They didn't talk. They didn't even move from where they sat, like moving would shatter the illusion. There was no hurry, no pressing need to be anywhere but right there, together. Bill's lip caught against Mike's and dragged just a little, and the hairs on his arms stood on end. Bill had no idea it could be like this. He had no idea this was possible. Now all of his nerve endings were firing off, writing it into his skin.

Eventually, Bill started to go numb from sitting still, and Mike separated from him with a little sigh, his warm brown eyes dark in the dim light, setting Bill at ease without his needing to say anything. He wasn't scared of Bill, and Bill wasn't scared of him. This was just theirs. They climbed up out of the clubhouse, Mike's hand tugging Bill through as he strained, and they hopped on their bikes and quietly headed back into the world.

And then Bill left, and he went and forgot Mike for twenty-four years.

—-

All of Mike's belongings fit in the trunk of his station wagon. Fully half of them are books, and half again of those are ones Mike has filled himself, either with newspaper clippings and photographs, or with his own loose script. Mike writes every single night, something even Bill has never managed despite having published five novels and started half a dozen more that he never followed through on. When pressed, Mike always says that he likes to keep records of everything. Bill doesn't want to intrude, but he does wonder what Mike could possibly be recording, now that the battle is, presumably, over. He can't imagine it's anything like Bill's Twitter or Instagram feeds full of pictures of expensive meals or advertisements for juice cleanses. Bill's own social media posts are mostly self-promotional, but Bill's never known how to self-record without cloaking it in fiction, anyway. Mike's gotten him back into the habit of writing on paper, and it's amazing how much easier the words seem to flow out of him. He doesn't even have to set up his website blockers or mute his notifications to stop himself from being distracted.

Everything Bill has with him is shoved into one rolling suitcase and a messenger bag. It's a lot like being on a promotional tour, except he's riding shotgun in a 1993 Buick and there are no inane interviews lined up for him aside from the daily back-and-forth of deciding where to stop and what to eat with Mike. Everything else he owns is in a storage unit in California, costing him money just by existing. Which is fine, for now. Living in California never agreed with Bill much anyway, if he's honest with himself, and he'd only moved out there to be with Audra, so it made sense that she ought to keep the house. He'll have to think about where he wants to end up soon, he supposes, but it's so easy to put it out of his mind while he's floating in this suspended reality with Mike, where the furthest future that matters is where they'll end up tomorrow.

They'd left Bev and Ben that morning, after the group text lit up with a selfie from Richie with his parents sitting behind him at their little dining room table. It was incredible how small and shrunken they looked— they had loomed so tall in Bill's memory, but even Richie's father, whose long-limbed stature he'd inherited, seemed smaller behind his thick, goggle-like glasses. The text read, **they told me theyre disappointed in me** , shortly followed by, **cause i never introduced them to ellen**.

Looking at the photo makes something unclench in Bill's chest. He thinks the others were all as worried as he was, after Richie left them.

It's Mike's turn to drive, so Bill snaps a photo of him with his arm slung across the steering wheel, sunglasses perched on his nose, singing along to something on the oldies station. He looks handsome, to the point where Bill wonders if it's taunting of him to send the picture, before he realizes how ridiculous the thought is and relents, sending it with the caption, **Mike Hanlon and The Temptations**.

Mike seems just as content to drift along wherever the road takes him as Bill does, though from Bill's perspective his reasons are about a hundred times more valid. Bill would pack his shit and go, too, if he'd been trapped in Derry for forty unbroken years. Bill hasn't quite figured out how to stop feeling guilty about that, about leaving Mike behind holding the gates for the rest of them. There are things he's managed to forgive himself for, but that isn't one of them. Mike doesn't hold a grudge, and that sort of makes it worse. He ought to be angrier. Bill would be. Bill feels angry so often he's a little bit scared of himself.

He dreamt about it, sometimes, after he and Mike hit the road together, after Derry. Memories blurring into his fears. He remembers the illusion of swimming in his own flooded basement, of Mike's bolt gun in his child self's trembling hand, held to his own forehead. In the dreams, his younger self lays out his sins.

 _"It's my fault Georgie is dead,"_ he cries, pale face contorted, finger against the trigger.

"No," Bill says, suspended in cold water as deep as an ocean. "No, you're just a kid, and it's not your fault. It's not your fault."

Another time, the apparition comes to him, saying, _"I forced Stan to go to that house. I forced him into the sewer. I left him behind. I made him swear, and then I left him. It's my fault."_ The barrel of the gun presses into his forehead, as cold as the water leeching the warmth from him, lapping against his chin and threatening to overtake his mouth.

"No, that's not true," Bill says in the dream. "He was our friend, he was being targeted too, he wanted to help, he wanted to save Bev…"

 _"Where is he now,"_ his child self shouts. _"Where did you leave Stan?"_

"If I could have r—remembered, this would never have happened," Bill says, his mouth beginning to flood with water. It tastes like blood, and he gags around it. "It's not my— it's not your fault he—"

But sometimes, the one holding the gun isn't a thirteen year old boy; it's just him, the guy he looks at every day in the mirror. He looks so tired, his hair growing long and unruly around his ears, going gray at the edges. His doppelgänger loads a bolt into the gun and stares at it in his hand. It seems so much smaller than it had felt when he held it as a boy.

 _"I dragged Eddie into that pit,"_ he says. _"I tried to run off half-cocked, and the others all had to leap in to save me, just like they always do."_

"We couldn't let It live," he tries to say, but the water rushes in, and the air bubbles out of his lungs. He tries to breathe in through his nose, and water clogs his sinuses. It hurts.

 _"I killed Eddie."_ The other Bill turns the gun in his hand, points it down into the water. Bill struggles to the surface, violently coughing up gray water, his forehead butting up against the barrel.

"We would never be safe until It was gone! It had to be all of us together!"

Bill used to wake from those dreams crying and gasping for air. Sometimes, he'd startle Mike awake too, and Mike would sit with him, letting him breathe until the feeling of drowning had passed and he could relax again. He wonders if he'll still have those dreams after the last few days.

But the worst dream is the one where he's holding the gun.

He tiptoes down the stairs, light flooding in from behind him, the stairs creaking under his sneakers. The basement is flooded, cardboard boxes sodden, loose papers floating on the surface, the shelves in disarray. And there, floating in the water, submerged up to his neck, is Mike, just as Bill left him when they were teenagers.

"Help," he chokes. "There's something around my foot, I can't— it won't let me go, Bill!"

"Oh, God, Mikey," Bill says, and rushes into the water, reaching under Mike's shoulders and trying to drag him up. He jerks, held fast by something under the surface. "I— I can't pull—"

"It's pulling me down, I can't get it off!" Mike's mouth dips below the water, and he sputters. Gun still held tightly in his hand, Bill dives down, struggling to keep his eyes open in the cold darkness of the flood. He gropes around Mike's leg until he comes to his ankle, and he sees a stark white hand gripping him tight enough to crush. Fear clenches in his gut, makes the thud of his heart roar in his ears. He follows the length of the white arm, expecting to see red slashes and a shock of red hair. But the face is unmarked, the hair dark, the eyes cold blue. The mouth opens, clouds of air bubbling upwards.

 _"I made him promise,"_ it says with his mouth, and he hears it as clearly as if it were speaking above the surface. His own blue eyes narrow angrily at him. _"I made him promise not to forget. I made him promise to stay."_ The thing wearing his young face tugs Mike down, grasping him at the knees while Mike kicks and struggles.

"Let go," he tries to say, but it's just noise and escaping air. He pries at the hands that dig tighter into Mike's jeans, scraping at the knuckles with his fingernails. It claws its way up Mike's body, dragging him below the surface. Bill looks down at the gun in his hand, then points it at his younger self's bone-pale face.

The doppelgänger pulls Mike's head into his hands and presses their lips together. Mike's eyes go wide, two white rings around dark circles that roll wildly in alarm. The other Bill sucks the air from Mike's lungs as Mike seizes and shudders.

"No," Bill tries to shout, but again, it bubbles out of him uselessly. His lungs clench around nothing. His hand clenches around the gun. He presses it to the thing's forehead. He pulls the trigger.

He woke shouting from that dream, and when Mike leapt awake, alert and battle-ready, Bill had to brush him off and go outside until he thought he could look at Mike without panicking.

In their travels, they've slept in plenty of weird places— divey motels, curled up under their own coats in the car, and on one memorable occasion, in the cramped guest room of a woman who could have been 55 or 95, who talked Mike's ear off about Santería and made absolutely the best hot toddy Bill's ever had in his life. They've shared space, and they've shared a bed. But things are undeniably different since they left Ben's house. They haven't been able to talk about it— they haven't had a real moment alone. There'll be no running from it now.

—-

Two months ago, Bill went home to his wife and realized he was a stranger to her.

The director and his co-writers on the screenplay had gone ahead and finished filming without him. The ending wasn't what Bill would have written— the conclusion to the novel had been pretty out there, and if the critics were to be believed, horribly unsatisfying. Looking back on it, Bill had to grudgingly concede the point. When he was younger, he had been caught up in the idea that catharsis was a fairy tale, that reality was never so clean and straightforward, and that was certainly true, to an extent. But he sees now how the loose ends of his own life had been dangling, unnoticed, for so long, how he'd been trying to grasp them through these narratives. He couldn't remember it, but it was all there, every page laying it out as if torn from one of Mike's scrapbooks.

In the film, the best friend turns out to be a killer with a split personality. Bill didn't see how that was better than the original ending, where the murders are the physical manifestation of guilt given form by a psychic ghost child, but hey, what did he know?

The salient point is that he returned home to find that the world had gone on without him, and in the end, his input was irrelevant. The studio was perfectly happy to have him out of their hair with their investment in him tied off with a neat little bow. The check cashed the same, whether he liked the ending or not.

With his leaving, something between he and Audra had undeniably shifted. Things were rocky before he left anyway. It could run hot and cold between the two of them, even in the good times— he had a tendency to pull away and go low-contact when he was absorbed in a story, and when she was away on long shoots they could go days and days without speaking. This had always been comfortable for them. They liked their space, and they liked to have someone to come back to when the solitude wore thin. It was different, being locked into a project with someone professionally and trying to maintain a relationship.

"Why does Tonie stay in the dream world?" Back when the script was still an early draft, she had tried to nudge him towards changing it. He wouldn't put together how much of his writing she didn't really like until just before he left.

"It's not a dream world, really, it's more like a pocket dimension between her universe and the wider multiverse," Bill had said, and Audra sighed.

"Pocket dimension, sure. But why doesn't she leave? Her twin can only keep killing people as long as Tonie dreams it in this… dimension, but she knows where the key is and how the door works, so she could leave whenever she wants."

"But she can't, because it's the only tie she has left to him. She doesn't want to sever the tie. If it's over, he's really dead."

"Okay, but then wouldn't it be a better message? Letting go is healthy, right?"

"You don't understand—"

It had turned into a pretty ridiculous fight, one of their pettiest. Bill felt exhausted with himself when he re-examined why he took that one so personally. _That's easy for you to say,_ he wanted to tell her. _What have you ever had to let go of? Getting a lead role in something your husband didn't write?_ But that was cruel and unfair, and besides, as far as he knew back then, he wasn't writing from experience. The truth was, Audra didn't really know the man she'd married, because Bill himself hadn't known who he was. He'd tried to write it down a hundred times without realizing it. Audra didn't like his work; that might have been okay if he'd never realized it was autobiography.

—-

He and Mike stop for the night in a little beach town on the Chesapeake Bay, somewhere in Maryland. The days are growing shorter. In a couple of weeks, daylight savings time will end and it'll be dark even earlier. The sun is just setting as they pull up to park by the boardwalk and split a pizza, sausage and green peppers, with no mushrooms on Bill's half. It's not as good as New England pizza, but after all day in a cramped car, it's still pretty fucking good. Mike takes a picture of Bill, pink-stained beach behind him, making a weird face with a long strand of cheese stretching from his contorted mouth.

"Delete that right now," Bill says around a mouthful of pizza, so it comes out more like, _Buhee da ray mow_.

"I'm posting it on Twitter and tagging you," Mike says, smile lines deepening.

"You don't even have a Twitter," Bill says, swallowing and setting the uneaten half-a-slice back down in the box. He reaches for Mike's phone, which Mike holds just out of reach above him. It's unfair how goddamn tall he is.

"I made one just now," Mike lies. "I'm gonna post it every day until they put it on the cover of Us Weekly."

"You're going to ruin my mystique," Bill laughs.

"How's this for mystique?" Mike leans in, and his mouth brushes Bill's. His tongue swipes across Bill's lip, just a touch. Bill shivers down to his toes, and he can only blame so much of that on the cold. "What'll the tabloids think of that?"

Bill doesn't want to think about it. California's more than two thousand miles away, and he wants it to stay there. "That I keep dating outside my league," he says, and turns away, going back for the rest of his pizza.

"Is what what this is? Dating?" Mike looks at him sidelong. Bill's face burns.

"I— What do you want it to be?" Bill's used to being the decision-maker, but right now the thought of deciding anything more complex than what to eat and where to sleep is overwhelming.

"All on me, huh?" Mike always sees right through his bullshit. He should know better than to try on Mike the things that usually placated Audra. "I don't exactly have a ton of experience to draw on."

"Y—you said—"

"I've been with my share of people, Bill, but nothing all that serious. Not easy to get all that close to people, in my situation." Whether Mike means being gay in small town Maine, or being the last line of defense against an interdimensional space clown, Bill isn't sure. "You're one of my best friends. You know I love you. I don't know what this will mean on top of that, yet, but I'm willing to find out, if you are."

In lieu of an answer, Bill leans in to kiss him again, firm and decisive. He doesn't have the words for this yet, and he doesn't know that he wants to find them. At least not now. His whole career has been the process of transforming all of his nebulous anxieties into something understandable, something digestible. He isn't ready to define this in such plain terms yet. He wants to live in the nebula a while longer. Is that so wrong?

They finish their pizza, and when the sun sinks behind the town's skyline, Bill pulls Silver off the back of the station wagon. It gleams in the streetlights, recently polished, the tires patched, the rust buffed away and the gears freshly oiled. It had been his and Mike's project, in the days immediately following the battle, when they were all still shocked and grieving. Despite that, Bill hadn't been quite ready to go home yet. He felt more accomplished with grease under his fingernails and a dirty rag in his hand than he had felt the last year and a half of filming. Silver handles like a dream, now, smooth and familiar under his guidance. He climbs on and Mike smiles, feet balanced on the pegs of the back wheel, hands gripping Bill's shoulders as Bill takes off down the boardwalk, cold wind whipping through his hair. It's awkward, and Mike's heft unbalances him a lot more than it did when they were teenagers, but it's also perfect. If things could always be this simple, Bill would be happy with that.

—-

Bill forgot Mike until he received a phone call late that summer, but like the others, he didn't remember everything all at once.

Despite the fact that he'd forgotten her entirely for two decades, Bev wasn't quite how he remembered her. She'd come into his life so late, so briefly, and had disappeared just as fast. Her memory, once it started coming back to him, was written over with drawings and stories and narratives he'd created to explain the loss of her, once she was gone. He'd spent three years thinking Beverly had left him behind and forgotten him either because there was something lacking in him, or because there was something ephemeral about her, something that had always been just out of reach even when she was still with them. The Beverly he had loved had been the girl, the person, but the Beverly he had been fixated on once she was gone was a fiction. A faded photograph, all the hard edges blurred out and the harsh colors softened.

He had felt protective of her as a boy. Possessive, if he thought of it uncharitably. And there was something between them, something that would only ever be theirs. But Beverly had never been his, and that was immediately clear to him.

He kissed her in the stairwell, and he remembered the end of summer, the itch of the long grass against his forearms, the sting of the fresh cut on his palm. He remembered the stickiness of her blood as it dried on his cheek, the way the sun felt on the back of his neck. He remembered a goodbye. _Don't forget me. Goodbye, goodbye._

The moment Bev pulled away, her eyes gentle and confused but not unhappy, Bill remembered another goodbye. When he was the one spirited away, leaving behind only a kiss as a memento.

Then there were more pressing things to worry about.

It was easier when their lives were on the line, when there was no time to waffle over his indecision. He had to take action, or else more people would die. What could be simpler than that? It had always been that way with him, in any situation. He was more productive under a deadline than he ever was left to his own devices. There had been times when he'd pounded out entire chapters in one sleepless night after a month or more of absolute ear-ringing silence in his head. The hard part came when he had to edit, when he had to sit with his choices and build on them. The hard part came in the aftermath of the fight, when you had to go back home and build yourself a life. Knowing he had been fighting a battle he hadn't remembered for nearly his entire life, how to go back to the woman he met in a time of peace, as a different man? How to recontextualize his relationships with Bev, or Mike, or any of the Losers, which had been forged in blood and with an act of war?

How big of a pretentious hack having a mid-life crisis _was_ he?

Audra had asked him, upon his return, why he had vanished, and to where. No matter how many times he offered her his story, it never seemed to land. There was no way to explain the truth without sounding completely crazy, but his half-truths about a childhood friend's funeral weren't quite cutting it either. Even given the circumstances of his death, she could sense the unusual agitation in him.

"Please, just… don't fucking lie to me," Audra had said.

"I'm not," Bill lied. "I can s—ssshow you his obituary, if you want."

"Then why didn't you just say so, before you left in the middle of a shoot with no fucking explanation? It's insane behavior, Bill! You're acting insane!" Audra's hands dropped to her sides, looking at him with heartbreaking eyes. "Please, please just tell me if there's someone else, 'cause I can't fucking take this weird bullshit you're feeding me anymore."

Stunned, Bill blinked. He found he had no idea how to answer. He had kissed Bev, yes. But there was nothing between them. There was no "someone else" to confess to. But there were, in a way, six someone elses, two gone, four left who knew him better than anyone else in his life, people who would always fit inside of him like the missing pieces of a puzzle. How to explain that?

"Wow," Audra said, when he didn't immediately respond. "Okay, I guess that's all I need to know. Jesus."

"No, no, it's not like that," he said, but she was already walking away.

"You said enough." The sound of her keys as she snatched them off the counter, the rev of her car's engine as she drove away, these things heralded an ending he now knew was inevitable. In her wake, he took off his ring, sat down to write the ending he wanted, started the story whose first words had been eluding him for years, and in the early hours of the following morning, when Audra still had yet to come home, Bill received his final message from Stanley.

—-

Bill's face is chapped and cold by the time they complete their circuit down the boardwalk and back, tears having gathered at the corners of his eyes and dried there. He wants to throw Silver to the ground and jump inside Mike's car and huddle by the heater until it finally sputters out lukewarm air, but a bike fast enough to beat the Devil deserves kinder treatment, and he carefully locks it back into place in its rack while Mike starts the car. When Bill climbs in and slams the door shut, Mike is blowing into his palms and rubbing them together.

"Here," Bill says, and takes Mike's hands, rubbing them between his own. Mike's hands are large, and rough, and lined with tiny, faded scars over the backs of his knuckles. There's a knobby callus on his ring finger where a pen or a pencil would rest. About two days ago, those hands were sliding through Bill's wet, untidy hair. Suddenly, his face feels flushed with more than just the cold. Bill swallows.

He remembers Mike's voice, low and quiet in Ben's bedroom, the way Bill's hand had gripped the towel around his waist a little tighter, the way water had dripped from his chin onto his chest, his heart beating wildly. He feels drunk with it. Maybe that's why he can't hold his head up any longer, why he dips down to press his lips to Mike's cracked knuckles.

Bill hears Mike breathe in hard through his nose. He propels forward recklessly, turning Mike's hands over, kissing his palms. He's being brave, he tells himself. This isn't foolhardiness. It's _Mike_. Safe as houses.

Mike swipes a thumb over Bill's lip, and then the space between them closes. Mike's hands go back into Bill's hair, and Bill decides he'd like it if they'd stay there forever. It's awkward, but Mike is long and looming, craning his neck to meet Bill so that Bill only has to strain a little. Their third kiss is heavier than their second, less dazed and more frenzied. There had always been something waiting outside for them before, but Bill finally feels like he's managed to hit that pause button on real life, and now he's free to live in whatever moment he chooses. He chooses this one.

He feels his locked limbs beginning to flood with warmth and loosen, the cold seeping out of him, replaced with fondness tinged with arousal. Mike's blunt nails on his scalp are like fire shooting across his nerves. He hasn't been this keyed up in years. He suddenly feels that the points of contact between them are far too small—he needs more. He needs to feel it. He clambers up out of his seat, pressing Mike back into his. He climbs over the gear stick, or tries to, banging his knee and knocking the car into neutral. It starts to roll forward.

"Fuck," Mike sputters, and slams his foot on the brake, knocking the stick back into park.

"Shit, sorry— I'm—" 

"It's okay, just, here—"

Mike helps Bill the last leg over, putting him firmly in Mike's lap. It's more cramped than Bill had planned it to be, as good as it feels to have Mike's thighs under his, warm and solid. Bill's head sort of knocks against the ceiling, but less so when he dips in to kiss Mike again.

"There," he breathes against Mike's lips. "Is that— I mean, is it—"

Mike laughs into his mouth, not unkindly. "I've been in worse positions." His eyes glitter a little bit in the dark, reflecting the streetlights that line the boardwalk. They crease pleasantly at the corners. He's always been handsome, but there's something about him now that makes Bill's heart clench. He's worn around the edges, not like something broken, but like something comfortably well-loved. Bill feels overwhelmed with the need to kiss him again, and then he forgets to be embarrassed by his clumsiness or the bruise he's going to have on his knee tomorrow. He does love Mike, the way he's always loved Mike, the way they've all always loved each other, but more than that, too. He wants Mike to know. Mike never forgets a detail, but he has a terrible feeling that Mike might have forgotten that.

Bill's hands trace over the seams of Mike's shirt, feeling his chest expand and contract, warm and alive underneath him. Mike grips his hair a little bit to tug his head back and kiss at the juncture of his jaw and his throat, and Bill is suddenly achingly hard in his jeans.

"Hhholy _shit_ , Mikey," he breathes. Mike grinds up against him, and oh fuck, he's hard too, and searingly hot. Bill practically melts into him, sinking bonelessly into the rocking motion. His back hits something hard, and before he can register the awkward dig of the steering wheel into his spine, the car bleats out an ear-splitting _honk_. "Fuck," he yelps, knocking his head against the roof of the car as Mike startles, his forehead colliding with Bill's jaw painfully.

Bill's heart is still pounding when he realizes Mike is absolutely crying laughing.

"Don't fucking laugh at me," Bill says, but he's laughing too, eyes squeezed shut as he sags, resting his forehead on Mike's shoulder. Mike's shoulders and chest are quaking with the effort of holding in his laughter. "Okay, I should have realized we're about twenty years too old to make out in a car, can you b—blame a guy?"

"I didn't want to burst your bubble," Mike says when he can breathe again, "But you're kinda cutting off the circulation in my legs."

"God damn it," Bill says, trying to lessen his weight on Mike's lap. He only succeeds in knocking his head against the ceiling again. "God— fuck—" Mike starts laughing again, and while he's incapacitated, Bill pushes the drivers' side door open and clambers out, jogging back around the front of the car to slide back into the passengers' side, red with embarrassment and cold. He draws his feet up to the seat and puts his head between his knees. "Just put me outta my misery."

"No such luck, Denbrough," Mike says, putting the car in reverse. "I'll put you in a motel room, how's that?"

Bill emerges from his self-made cocoon, his ears burning. He buckles his seatbelt. "Yeah, I… I could live with that."

Mike smiles. The heater has finally started to warm up, and dry air blows against Bill's fingers. He licks his lips, still feeling the way Mike's mouth had unfolded under his.

—-

Bill had been twenty-seven when _The Glowing_ was optioned. Bill's agent explained to him that "optioned" meant they had sold the possibility to hypothetically make a movie, maybe. Bill got five thousand dollars out of the deal, movie or not, and what he didn't spend paying off a fraction of his student loans he used to buy his first real, adult suit. He wore the suit to his first real Hollywood party, and that was where he met Clint Jacobs.

Clint was a producer— the producer responsible for his impending deal with New Line, if he understood correctly. Apparently he had read Bill's book and liked it enough to have his people call Bill's people. Bill's person, to get uncomfortably specific about it. His teeth were just this side of too white, and he had the most perfectly affected tousle of hair Bill had ever seen.

"William," Clint said, pulling him into a brief hug like they were old friends, holding his drink aloft. "Great to see you, man, so glad you could make it. So glad. Okay flight in?"

"It was fantastic, Mr. Jacobs," Bill said deferentially, though he wasn't actually sure if Clint was only five years older than him or maybe ten or fifteen. It was pretty hard to tell with some of these folks. Clint's company had, in fact, paid for his flight, and it had been his first time flying in first class. He had felt like he was getting away with something the entire six hours they were in the air, but especially when the flight attendant had brought him an actual drink in an actual glass before the plane had even taken off, like he was some kind of prince.

"Relax, Will! It's just Clint to my friends," Clint said, and Bill had been disarmed enough to think of it as a genuine gesture. "Can't tell you how excited I am about the project." That's what the movie always was between him and Clint— _the project_. "That story of yours, the first time I read it, I knew you had something really special. Something unique. This whole impossible world you've made up, you really make people believe in it! Sort of peters out at the end there, but I like that about it too, you know? Really leaves you wanting more."

Bill didn't have the fortitude to feel truly insulted. If anything it just made him a little more eager to play it cool. He could take constructive criticism. He could take it all day. This man picked _him,_ after all.

"Now, come over here," Clint said, "there's this actor I'd really love to introduce you to—"

His professional relationship with Clint had been long and fruitful, producing every big screen adaption of one of his works to date. They're still fairly friendly, as far as his working relationships go, but there had never been a repeat of that first party, whereafter he had followed Clint home in the backseat of Clint's hired car, drunk on star power and expensive alcohol, and Clint had welcomed him into the biggest house Bill had ever stepped foot inside and proceded to fall to his knees to give Bill the most enthusiastic blowjob Bill had ever received. Not one to be a rude guest, Bill had reciprocated— he had never done it before, but the theory was clear enough, and he had a sparkling example to follow. All said, it wasn't that hard. He liked Clint, and he liked how Clint made him feel, and he liked returning the favor. Never let it be said Bill Denbrough couldn't do whatever he set his mind to.

Clint had never offered again. In fact, he carried on as if nothing had ever happened. Bill supposed that was just the way things were in Hollywood. Something that could only happen here, in this liminal space created by an economy built on people pretending for a living. Because of this, and the fact that he met Audra during filming the very next year, none of it ever really sank in for Bill. It didn't have to mean anything— it clearly didn't to Clint, and it had no functional effect on his life or on his conception of himself. Why should it?

He managed to put it out of his mind for twelve years before he was finally forced to recontextualize it within the full scope of his life. He had not kissed Clint. This, somehow, made it less significant to Bill. Clint was a friend, or perhaps more a friendly acquaintance. A colleague. One with whom he had shared a little afterparty indiscretion with. Clint exclusively slept with men, he was now aware of that, but Bill did not. Bill was married, happily, to a woman, and he didn't think about other women, or other men, at all. There was nothing to think about, until the day "DERRY, ME" appeared on his caller ID.

—-

Perhaps from some angles the Ocean View Motel could have been said to have ocean views, but not from the angle their room was at; it opens up towards the cracked pavement of a parking lot. But that's fine. Bill doesn't plan on looking at the _ocean_ much that night.

He tells Mike to take their bags out of the car while he goes inside to rent the room, which is probably unnecessary, since the two of them are living out of a backpack and a duffel bag, for all intents and purposes, but a part of Bill he doesn't want to acknowledge does feel a little nervous about cluing the person at the desk in about their sleeping situation. She's probably seen it all, but there's a loud little voice with a Maine accent in the back of his head that tells him to keep it quiet. If Mike realizes what he's doing, he doesn't say, and Bill appreciates the veneer of bravery it allows him.

Bill unlocks the door and follows Mike inside, and as soon as their bags hit the floor, Bill is pushing Mike to sit on the edge of the bed so that he can kiss him without craning his neck. Mike kisses him back sweetly, his arms curling around Bill's waist while Bill takes his face in his hands. In this position, Bill is actually a little bit taller, and he tilts Mike's jaw up to kiss him more deeply, the solid heft of his chest pressing warm against Bill's stomach. They haven't even flipped the lights on yet, and it's dark except for a sliver of the warm parking lot floodlight leaking in through the drawn curtains. It curves around the slope of Mike's cheek, illuminating one eye with flecks of gold. Bill pulls back to admire him, arousal burning through him all the way to his fingertips.

He's wanted one thing in particular since the moment Mike kissed him. And sure, maybe it's the only thing he really knows how to do in this situation, but that doesn't lessen the want. It's something in his power, and something he can picture so clearly, something that he has to admit he hasn't stopped picturing for days. He leans in for one more deep, searching kiss, and when he pulls back, he sinks to the floor between Mike's knees.

Mike blinks down at him, heavy-lidded, and his breathing stills. Bill's hands have come to rest on Mike's thighs, waiting for some form of assent.

Bill does not expect him to say, "You're not worried about what might be on the floor at a place like this?"

He frowns his way into a laugh. "I mean, not really?"

Mike tries to laugh, too, but it seems unsteady. "Don't want to check for roaches or, or bedbugs, then?"

"I'm not _Eddie_ ," Bill says, and then feels guilty for joking about him. He sighs and leans his cheek against Mike's knee. "Also, all of us have crawled around in sewer water more than once. I can handle a hypothetical cockroach. Are you _trying_ to kill the mood?"

Mike hesitates just long enough for all of Bill's reckless horny energy to dissipate. He leans back on his heels, watching Mike start to protest, "No—"

"Yeah, you are," Bill says, like a revelation, and he pushes himself to his feet, his knees creaking as he stands. He goes to the wall and flips the switch, and squints as the bedside lamp fills the room with yellow light. "I'm kinda confused. Do you not… do you not want this?"

"That is _not_ it," Mike says adamantly. His face is lined with hesitance and guilt that Bill does not remember seeing there an hour ago.

"Back at Ben's you told me not to bullshit you," Bill says. He hangs back by the wall, almost afraid he's going to scare Mike off if he comes too close. "So I didn't. But now it seems like you're the one who wants to—"

"I'm not— augh. I'm sorry. I know, I shouldn't—" Mike hasn't looked this panicked since the battle. Bill doesn't like that look on his face one bit, least of all the idea that he could have caused it somehow. "It's stupid, I know, I'm sorry."

"It's not stupid," Bill says, deflating. "Whatever it is, it's _not_ stupid, but can we just— talk about it?"

Mike has covered his face with his hands, his head hanging between his hunched shoulders. The room is very still for an alarmingly long time, or maybe only a few moments that Bill's anxious mind stretches out into hours. He doesn't notice that he has held his breath until Mike sighs heavily, his shoulders sinking. He lifts his head, his eyes round and wide.

"Could you come over here?" He says it in such a gentle voice, but it hits Bill like a whipcrack, and he's rushing back over to sit next to Mike on the bed in an instant. Mike leans into him a little. Bill is just grateful he hasn't fucked up the one really good thing he has going for him right now. After a bit, Mike speaks up again. "I'm worried that I talked you into this."

Bill frowns. "Talked me—"

"I know you're an adult man who makes his own decisions," Mike says with a little roll of his eyes.

"Mikey, the only reason you're not the softest guy I know is because I'm friends with Ben Hanscom. If you think _you_ could strongarm _me_ into, what—" Bill scoffs. "Oh no, my best friend is a really nice, handsome guy who wants to fuck me, what a d—disaster!"

Mike looks away, covering his mouth with his hand. Bill realizes he's being shy— it's endlessly endearing, and it kind of makes Bill want to blow him even more.

"Yeah, okay," he mumbles. He rubs his palm over his face, like he can wipe the embarrassment away. "But, like— what happens when you go back?"

"Go back?" Tension seeps back in, the idea of a looming finish line an unpleasant one.

"You've got a whole life to go back to," Mike says. "You can't drive around sightseeing with me forever."

"I've got a U-Haul full of junk to go back to," Bill says. "A few friends, maybe. Mostly Audra's, now." He doesn't want to think about what she's been telling people about him, about what he's been doing. She wouldn't even be wrong anymore, as much as he's trying to convince himself he doesn't have to feel guilty about that. "You're not— I mean, okay, maybe I'm putting off dealing with that, a little, but—"

"We're friends, and we care about each other, I'm not arguing that," Mike says. "But I'm not naive enough to think you're gonna want to stay packed in a car with me, living out of rest stops and motels forever."

Bill rankles a little, irritated for reasons that are hard to pin down. "You think you can read my mind, Hanlon?"

"No, I just know this isn't sustainable. It's… convenient."

That really sets Bill off, his face flushing in anger. _"Convenient?"_

"I didn't mean it the way you're thinking—"

"Didn't you?" It hurts, unexpectedly. He hates people telling him what he ought to feel, but this feels like an insult to his integrity on top of that. "You think you're, like, a rebound, or a mid-life crisis? Big Bill getting his ya-yas out before he settles back down and lets the royalty checks come in?"

"Please, please don't—- that isn't— shit." Mike stands, placing his hands on Bill's shoulder. He looms over Bill, blocking the faint light from the crack in the curtains, engulfing Bill entirely in his shadow. "Listen to me, please, I didn't mean it that way."

Bill stands, brushing Mike's hands away. They come to rest at his sides, taut and aimless. Mike is still a head taller than him, but he seems to shrink in that moment. He looks at Mike— really looks at him, taking in the broad length of him, the fresh lines in his face, the hint of gray starting to sneak its way into his dark hair. He left Mike alone for twenty-four years. From what he's learned, Richie and Eddie and Stan were gone not long after him. Bev, Ben, himself and the others, blinking out one after another, stars snuffed out of Mike's sky. But Mike never forgot. They left him in Derry, and there he stayed, the hope of humanity holding Pandora's box shut.

What would that kind of solitude do to a person? That kind of loneliness? He had remembered how it felt, to come up against the brick wall of indifference that was Derry's main line of offense. Then he had left, and the fight had faded to the back of his mind, no more urgent than a dream he might later transmute into a story pitch. What would it have done to him to keep fighting for forty long years?

 _He thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts._ God, he'd forgotten how small and desperate it had made him feel, to rage and scream and fight against something no one else could see, that they didn't want to see. But in the end, his friends had always been there to tell him, _I see it too_.

What would he have done, if they hadn't been there? What would it have done to him?

"I'm not going to leave you alone again," Bill says, and takes Mike's balled up fist in his hands. He feels him twitch, feels the hesitance in him. "I don't know where we'll end up, or how long we can keep driving. We'll split up again, that's just going to have to happen at some point. But I need you to know that doesn't mean I'm ever leaving you alone. _Alone_ alone. Okay?"

Mike's shoulders shake almost imperceptibly. Bill can feel the tremor down his arm, into his clenched fist. Mike breathes out through his nose.

"It seems stupid to be this scared," Mike says softly. "I, I mean, after— after—- monsters and death and—"

"It's not stupid," Bill says. "But me and the others, we're not gonna forget again. We will always be here for you, even if we're across the country, or on the other side of the world, or, shit, I dunno. On the moon? In another galaxy?"

"In a parallel universe where everything is the same except we're all bald?" Mike's face cracks a little bit, into a small, warm smile that eases the tension out of Bill's shoulders.

"In this parallel universe where you're all bald, and I have a long, luxurious head of hair... I will _always_ find you again. Okay? If you call me, I'll come. I'll always come."

Mike ducks his head, his eyes shining. He nods.

Bill steps closer and slips his arms under Mike's, holding him close and pressing his face into Mike's collar, breathing in the smell of his sweat. Mike's arms are around him in an instant, crushing Bill tightly to his chest. Mike's hugs are relentless, and also one of the better things about being alive.

"I'm all greasy, and you smell like you live in a car," Bill says into Mike's chest, which he's starting to get a feel for— Mike is kind of unfairly built for an amateur-historian-slash-librarian.

"Yeah, okay," Mike says, and the sound vibrates against Bill's cheek pleasantly. Mike's voice is low and soft, and a little wet in a way Bill would like to smooth over. "Maybe shower first."

Before they can bring themselves to release each other, Bill's phone starts buzzing in his pocket. He slips out of Mike's hold, glancing at the screen. His throat tightens.

"It's— it's-—Audra," he says, her name caught in his throat. "Sorry, I—"

"No, of course," Mike says, backing away with his hands up in surrender. Bill taps to accept the call. She hasn't spoken to him since he moved out, weeks ago. The last two months stretch on like an eternity in Bill's memory. He feels like he's aged a decade and regressed two all at the same time.

He lifts the phone to his ear.

"Hey."

"Bill," Audra says by way of greeting. He can hear the tension in her voice. "Um." She sighs into the receiver. "Well, I guess it's good to know you're alive."

"I didn't think you wanted to hear from me," Bill says. Mike looks sort of helpless across from Bill, like he's trying not to listen in, even though it's impossible not to. Bill tries to convey with his eyes that it's okay, he doesn't mind. He doesn't want Mike to have to worry about any of this, which isn't his fault.

"I don't know," Audra says, exasperated. He can't hear any sounds behind her but static. He wonders where she is. She always used to pace when she was on the phone, walking herself tired, back and forth across the tiles of their kitchen floor. Is she doing that now, or is she holding herself still, braced for whatever she needs to say? "I don't know, I guess—" She sighs again, and he can almost see the round glass of her eyes when she's worked up like this. "I don't know. Where are you right now?"

"Maryland," Bill answers.

"I thought you were in New Orleans."

"We were, but something came up— we had to, um. There was kind of a crisis, up in New York, and we had to—"

"A _crisis?_ "

"...It's hard to explain," Bill says, feeling the inadequacy of the explanation as it leaves his lips.

"Right, of course," Audra says. He can feel her closing off. "I just— I need to know if you have an address I can send this to."

"Address?" Bill glances around the room as if it will reveal a mailbox to him. "Uh— no, I mean. We're just at a motel right now. Just a pitstop."

"Well, do you know when you'll have one? Or when you'll be back home? Because I really just— I really need you to sign these. I'd like it done. You know?"

"Home?" It feels jarring to hear her say it like that, though they both know he doesn't have a home to go back to.

"In California," she clarifies. A moment later, her meaning becomes clear to him. The divorce. She's gone ahead and talked to a lawyer and started the proceedings without him. Bill… supposes that's fair. He did sort of fuck off about as entirely as a person can fuck off without outright leaving the country, after they talked about it.

"I— yeah, of course, sorry," he says, digging his fingers into his temple to ward against growing headache. "I mean. I can probably drive back. Be there in a few days."

"You can probably do it, or you _will_ do it, Bill?"

"I'll do it," he says. "I'll let you know when I'm back in town."

"Okay. Thank you." She doesn't quite sound like she believes him, but she also sounds a little relieved to have the conversation done.

"Sure," Bill says, and feels like an idiot. Audra sighs into the receiver again, a puff of static in Bill's ear.

"Okay. Well. Drive safe," she says helplessly.

"Sure. You, uh, you too—" He winces. "I mean, not that you'll b—be driving more than, but, you know, b--be s—suh—suh—" His teeth clench, his traitor mouth retreating to its old patterns.

"Safe? Yeah, okay, Bill," Audra says, freeing him from needing to finish his sentence. Years-old shame washes over him and makes his face burn.

"Right," he croaks. "Okay. Um, goodbye." The line goes dead, and he sets the phone on the bedside table, breathing out a huge knot of tension. "Fuck."

"So… California, then?" Bill turns, and Mike is just smiling sheepishly by the window.

"You don't have to come," Bill says, knowing Mike will be coming whether he asks him to or not. 

"I thought maybe we'd be back in Louisiana by Halloween, but this could be fun, too. I've never been out west."

"Jesus fuck, it's almost Halloween?" He's been on the road for so long, he stopped keeping track. "Shit, it's almost November. Shit. I have to. I have to vote?" He looks up helplessly at Mike. "Do you have to vote?"

"I voted absentee before I left," Mike says, and of course he did. Bill should have guessed. "Derry always goes red in the general elections, but there was a pretty important city council race, too."

Bill has no idea what's even on the ballot back home, aside from the presidential race. He opts not to reveal that. "Yeah, right, of course." He runs his hand back through his hair, and then over his face. A day's growth of stubble rasps against his fingers. He realizes after a moment Mike didn't actually ask why they were going to California. He's that ready to follow Bill anywhere he decides to go. The knowledge settles uneasily in his chest. "She, uh— I've got divorce papers to sign, I guess."

"Oh," Mike says. "Right. I'm sorry, man."

"Don't be," Bill says. He feels like a skeeze all over again, having his… whatever Mike is console him about his impending divorce, even though this has been the plan all along. He busies himself with pulling his power cord out of his travel bag, plugging in his phone, and pulling out his toiletries bag to take into the bathroom. The bathroom is little, two fresh white towels tucked up on a shelf over the toilet. He sets his bag down on the sink and turns to crank the hot water on in the tub, then recoils at what he sees, letting out a strangled yelp before he can stop himself.

"What, what is it?!" Mike comes barrelling in from the other room like he's ready to go Richie on whatever it is. Bill feels incredibly stupid, because—

"It's just a spider," he says, peering suspiciously at it. It's a big brown thing with its legs all curled in pathetically, turned over on its back in the bathtub. "Didn't mean to scare you. It just surprised me."

Mike's shoulders sink, and he steps over beside Bill to see the dead thing in the tub. His whole face softens looking at it. Bill reaches over to turn the water on, hoping to wash it down the drain, wondering if it'll fit.

"Wait—" Mike puts a hand on Bill's wrist. He stops mid-motion. "Don't do that."

"Okay," Bill says, and waits to see what Mike wants him to do instead. He's spent the most memorable days of his increasingly strange life fighting a live spider about three hundred times this dead one's size, but that doesn't mean he wants to shower with it. Mike goes quiet and still, and Bill is frozen watching him think. Mike's eyes shine in the fluorescent bathroom light. He turns suddenly, walking back into the room with determination.

"Mike?" Bill cranes his head around the doorway to see Mike glancing around the room, searching for something. He pauses and turns to the bedside drawer, which he rolls open and withdraws a little black book from. Before Bill can register that it's a Bible, Mike is tearing a page out. Bill chokes. "Mike, what—?"

Mike returns with the scrap of paper between his fingers, densely packed text on yellowing edges. He kneels, sliding the page underneath the little corpse in the tub and scooping it up delicately.

"I don't want it to end up down there," Mike says, like the spider was once a dear friend. "Nothing should end up down there."

 _It's just a spider,_ Bill wants to say, but the words catch in his throat, and he knows he shouldn't. He'd like to think he understands, and watching Mike tenderly cradle the dead creature in his broad palms, he almost does.

"Let's take it outside," he says instead, and Mike looks to him with a fragile smile, and the feeling behind it spools outward through Bill's chest.

The air outside is chilly, and in the quiet they can hear the sound of the ocean. Mike scans the parking lot, shielding the little corpse from the wind.

"Is there any place to bury it? A patch of grass or something?"

"Uh…" Bill cranes his head around. There are little landscaping patches, but they're all stone rather than dirt. "I don't know, let's walk down the street a bit." He doesn't know what exactly has gotten into Mike, why he's so attached to a dead bug, but he doesn't want to push the issue. Mike starts off through the parking lot until he finds the sidewalk, and he follows it away from the motel and into the neighborhood tucked behind it. There are more stone lawns here, but at the end of a driveway they find a planter box full of scrubby little plants that have wilted in the cold, growing out of the dirt.

"Here," Mike says decisively. He goes to his knees in front of it.

"You want me to…?" Bill makes a digging motion with his hand, and Mike nods slowly.

"Please."

He guesses he's done weirder things in his life. He sticks his fingers in the dry dirt and digs a little hole the size of his palm. Mike deposits the spider in the depression as gently as a parent putting a child down for a nap.

It occurs to Bill that it would be so easy for him to hurt Mike. He's quite possibly the strongest person Bill knows, but maybe the most delicate too. He watches Mike cover the dead spider with dry planting soil, and he thinks, _I have to protect this man._

—-

The night Eddie and Stan left them again, Bill laid on the far side of the bed, his heart thudding in his ears like he was still sixteen years old and full of bubbling teen anxiety. Being with his old friends again had a way of doing that to him, transporting him back to those days when he felt simultaneously so helpless and like all the power to change the world was right there in his hands, if he could just harness it. The power was in his hands now, he knew, and the only thing stopping him from reaching across the bed was fear. Fear of what it meant, maybe, or fear of what it would change.

"Bill," Mike said, a question, and Bill sucked in a breath and vowed to be brave. He turned to his side to see the faint outline of Mike's tired, handsome face looking at him in the dark. Bill reached his hand out, and Mike met it with his own, interlocking their fingers between them.

"Today was…" Bill sighed through his nose. "A lot happened."

"I'm so exhausted, I think I could sleep for a week," Mike said, and Bill tried to squash his disappointment. He was dead tired, too, what exactly did he think was going to happen?

"Are you okay?" Bill stroked the side of Mike's thumb with his, and Bill felt Mike's hand tighten around his briefly.

"I think I oughta be asking you that," Mike said, but Bill didn't quite know how to answer, so he didn't. They lay in silence for a while, listening to the sound of the heat moving through the vents. Mike's palm was dry and warm against Bill's. Bill wanted to kiss him again. "Bill," Mike whispered, and Bill's breath stopped in his throat.

"Yeah," Bill whispered in turn.

"What are we gonna do?"

In the dark, at a whisper, they could have been kids again, huddling together in the clubhouse in defiance of an uncertain future. Bill inched closer, drawing Mike's hand and forearm up to his chest, tucked under his chin. How was Mike the one asking him for guidance, for leadership, when Bill still felt like he was running a show without a script?

He rested his mouth against the back of Mike's hands, his lips brushing over Mike's cracked knuckles.

"I don't know," he answered honestly, for once in his life. Maybe that was his way of being brave, now, not trying to barrel through with no thought for the consequences, but to admit he didn't have a solution yet. "I'm not sure I ever did. I… The more I remember growing up, the less I understand why anybody listened to me at all."

"Maybe because all of us had crushes on you," Mike says sleepily, his voice lilting up with humor. Bill frowned.

"What?"

"Come on, you had to know."

"Know _what?_ " BIll felt like he'd missed a stair in their conversation.

"Oh my god," Mike mumbled, a huff of warm air against their joined hands. "Of course Bev liked you."

"Well… sure, I guess," Bill said, shuffling his feet uncomfortably under the top sheet.

"Rich fought with you a lot, but I'm pretty sure it was just because he was so worried about what you thought of him."

"Yeah, but…"

"And Eddie… y'know, he told me one time he was pretty sure he'd do anything you asked him to, no question."

"He said that?" Bill shook his head against the pillow. "I— that's not, that's just… loyalty, though, _friendship_ , I—"

"And if you didn't know _I_ had a thing for you…" Bill felt his breath catch in his throat.

"You k—kissed me," he said, almost too quiet to hear, breathed against Mike's taut knuckles.

"You kissed me first," Mike said, and Bill knew they weren't talking about what happened a few hours ago anymore.

"I— I wasn't sure you remembered."

Mike just kept breathing steadily, in and out. "I never forgot."

Something clenched in Bill's chest. He wanted to tell Mike, _I'm sorry,_ and _Is it too late now?,_ and _I'm scared you're going to keep going without me while I'm stuck trying to sort out the parts of me I forgot,_ but Mike's breath was so slow, and Bill was so tired, and it felt like too much to explain there, in the dark. He wasn't even sure he totally understood it himself.

He faintly kissed Mike's knuckles, almost like an accident. Mike didn't stir, already asleep.

—-

In a motel in Maryland, Bill Denbrough wakes, his back pressed to Mike's broad chest, and wants.

They didn't do anything but sleep last night. Bill dreamt of the basement, and water, of swimming down to unstop the drain, clogged with old papers and drawings gone to mush, and the water swirled and slid and tore away the ghost that lived there, the child with long gawky limbs and a mouth that wouldn't cooperate. He drained his little self away, and he hadn't screamed or cried or fought.

He wakes thinking, _I don't want to sink_. It settles into his limbs quietly, heavily, like grief. He's been so long afraid of the threat of floating. He never imagined he'd find himself horrified to be an anchor.

Behind him, Mike sighs in his sleep, a hot gust of air on Bill's nape, and warmth washes through him like a crashing wave. _I want…_

He feels like moving will shatter it, this perfect, terrifying moment, and he breathes as carefully as a person in a movie would diffuse a bomb. He both wants Mike to wake up and wants to stay perfectly preserved in this moment with him, when everything is possible and nothing is certain. He wants to know. He's terrified to know.

 _Be brave,_ says Stan's voice, from somewhere in the tangle of his thoughts, and Bill aches with it.

Bill twines his fingers with Mike's where they rest on the blanket. He guides their hands to his mouth. Behind him, Mike shifts, groans in the way of someone just waking. Heat surges in Bill, dizzying. He can feel Mike becoming hard against him. He hears the sound of Mike's tongue parting his lips, wetting them.

"Bill?" Mike's voice rasps and cracks deeply with sleep. Bill feels molten in his arms. He presses back against him.

"Yeah," is all he can manage. He _wants_. Higher thought processes take a back burner for the moment. His mouth is pressed to Mike's knuckle. Mike shudders out a sigh.

"Um." As Mike wakes, his limbs tighten and lock. "I."

"Mike," Bill says, a request. He feels like he'll burst if Mike doesn't keep touching him. "Please." He feels Mike's head tip forward, forehead resting against the back of Bill's. Another uneven breath breaks against the shaggy, overlong hair clinging to Bill's neck.

"What…" Mike swallows, pressing his nose into Bill's hair. "What do you want?"

"I don't care," Bill says, hating the desperation of his voice and the way it breaks. He doesn't even know where to start. "I— I care, but I— Anything, _you_ , please." He slides his mouth down around Mike's finger, down to the second knuckle, feeling the rough pads of it against his tongue. It's not enough.

"God," Mike groans, and presses helplessly against Bill through their clothes. Something in Mike's hesitance has broken, and his aimless shifting becomes a grind, harder and more insistent.

"I thought about—" Bill says, Mike's fingers pressed to his mouth. "I thought about you, about— about being with you— I wanted to suck you off." Mike shudders behind him.

"Jesus," he breathes, and Bill can feel the hot length of him rubbing against him. "Last night?"

"Yeah," Bill says. "But— before that, too. On the road, I think— In New Orleans, I wanted to kiss you, and then I wanted— I wanted—"

"What?"

"Everything. Anything you wanted to give me. I wanted to touch you so bad, it made me feel nuts."

Mike laughs, little gusts of hot air that make his hair stand on end. He pops two of Mike's fingers into his mouth, then, and sucks on them, and Mike's laughter breaks.

"I feel like I've been going insane for years," Mike says quietly. His nose presses behind Bill's ear, his lips sealed to the spot where his jaw meets his neck. He can feel the early growth of Mike's beard there, new and foreign and everything he hasn't been able to articulate until now. Mike's hand slips down across his chest, into the waistband of his shorts, and grips him, wet from his own mouth. It tears a sound from Bill's throat that would strike him as alarming, if he could think through the haze of want. Mike's hand works him, one good pump— he thrusts into the tight circle of Mike's fist, and he wants _more_.

"Fuck, Mikey, please." Bill grabs at Mike, trying to pull him closer, grinding back against Mike's cock pressed against him even while he fucks Mike's fist. It's too much. It's not enough. The feeling bursts under his skin, new and old all at once. He paws ineffectually at Mike's underwear, and then at his own, shoving it down to feel Mike's clothed erection against his bare skin, rough fabric gone damp.

Mike helps him finish his work and shoves Bill's shorts down to his thighs. He tugs his own waistband down just enough to pull himself out. The hot, hard length of him settles into the cleft of Bill's ass, not parting him yet, but— Bill's head swims. He thinks— He wants Mike to fuck him. He's almost definitely not ready for Mike to fuck him, logistically speaking, but he wants Mike to fuck him, and the thought of it rolls through him, lighting his nerves up like a thundercloud.

Mike's hand slides over the swell of Bill's ass, gives it a squeeze— This is so outside of Bill's wheelhouse, but he's not scared, just desperate for more of whatever Mike is willing to give. Mike's cock presses between his cheeks, and Bill feels him give a shallow thrust against him, not inside him, not enough, but it's still so good.

"Yeah, God, please, fuck," Bill babbles, shocked by his own abandon. It's like a dam broke, and all of his pent-up energy is bubbling out of him unstoppably.

Mike's hand has gripped him at the jut of his hipbone. Bill grasps at it now, pulls it back to his mouth, licks at his palms and fingers. Mike seems to follow his lead, and when he takes his hand back he uses it to slick himself, coating his cock. He points the blunt head to the juncture of Bill's thighs, and they part at the pressure, allowing Mike to slide between. Mike's cockhead presses up behind his balls and sends pleasure rolling through him, shocking the air from his lungs. He's never felt anything like it. Mike fucks into the press of Bill's thighs and pants in his ear, and Bill, caught between the pressure of Mike's fist around him and Mike moving behind him, loves it so much it makes his head spin.

Mike presses wet kisses to the lobe of his ear and the flushed skin of his pulse point. He wants to kiss Mike back so badly. He wants his mouth on Mike anywhere he can get it, but Mike's other hand has slid up Bill's shirt to splay against his chest, so Bill has nowhere to direct the desire. Next time, he wants them facing each other. He wants to be able to see Mike's face, to kiss him deep while—

"Fuck, fuck, fuck, _fuck, a—ah—_ " He's coming before he even notices he's close, making a mess of Mike's hand. Mike strokes him through it, clings to him like a liferaft, fucking Bill's thighs faster and more unsteadily. Bill clenches around Mike instinctually, and he can feel Mike shudder. Bill has sweat through his shirt, and Mike's hand on his chest slides, losing its grip. He doesn't want to stop Mike now, wants to feel him coming and think, _I did that_ , but god, he wants to turn around to see. He wants to kiss Mike while he comes, wants to hold his face in his hands and see the way his face crumples.

Mike slides out of him, moving to finish himself off with his hand rather than Bill's thighs. Bill, fighting through his post-orgasmic daze, feels a surge of indignation. He flips over and twines his hands with Mike's, wet with Bill's come and sliding obscenely over Mike's strained and purpling cock.

"Come on," Bill says. He feels greedy, and he kisses Mike's mouth greedily, opening up and letting Mike in deep. Their hands slide together, and Mike presses him down into the bed, and Bill winds his arm around and grips the back of Mike's head to pull him in closer. Mike comes like that, between the tangle of their bodies, held down and against Bill. Bill forces his eyes open to watch the way his jaw drops open, the way his brow contorts, and his eyelashes flutter. Bill watches with satisfaction, warm and sleepy and content, until Mike collapses to the bed, crushed against Bill, his face tucked into Bill's shoulder. Mike's feet dangle off the end of the bed. Bill tilts a knee up to accommodate him between his legs.

"Holy shit," Mike mutters into the meat of Bill's shoulder. Bill laughs tiredly, a nearly soundless little breath.

"Yeah, pretty much."

"I think you woke up the neighbors," Mike says, reluctantly rolling off Bill. Bill tries not to be too disappointed, and he tucks himself into Mike's arm and drapes himself partly across his chest instead. His throat works. He's too fucked out to remember shame.

"I wasn't that loud, was I?"

"I think they probably heard you in Derry," Mike says. 

"They're jealous," Bill says, closing his eyes and tucking his face into Mike's shirt. When he opens his eyes again, Mike's chest has been replaced by a pillow, and the light in the room has shifted, brighter and warmer. Mike is walking out of the bathroom, a towel wrapped around his waist in a very visually pleasing inversion of their encounter at Ben's house. Mike doesn't seem to notice he's awake, and Bill takes quiet pleasure in watching him putter about the room, the same way he's done a dozen times before, but with something else simmering under the surface of it. Mike puts on deodorant, and clean clothes, scratching at the beard on his chin that he has evidently decided to let grow. He pulls the edgeworn notebook and a pen out of his bag. When he goes to sit, he sees that Bill's eyes are open, watching him.

"Morning," he says, smiling softly. Bill's heart jitters a little in his chest. "Sleep okay?"

"You fucked the daylights out of me," Bill says, mush-mouthed. He really needs to brush his teeth. Jesus, he hopes he didn't have terrible morning breath when he basically slobbered all over Mike like a dog.

Mike ducks his head shyly. It's so cute Bill sort of wants to fuck him again, even though he doesn't think he'll be able to manage that for… a few hours at least. Maybe get a cup of coffee and a bagel in him first. He should get up, shower and all, but he pats the rumpled bedsheets beside him instead. Mike has yanked the most egregiously dirtied sheet off the bed. Bill is going to leave a very big tip when they leave, for sure. Mike's weight dips the bed, makes Bill sink against his side.

"Go ahead and write, I'll get ready in a little bit," Bill says, and closes his eyes again, letting himself drift off at the sound of Mike's deep, steady breaths and the scratching of pen on paper. He floats in and out of sleep until his phone dings where it's sitting on the side table. He rolls away from Mike's warmth, sitting up to read the text. It's from Richie.

**hey bill hows the excellent adventure going**

Bill smiles faintly. He needs to wash up before he can even think about answering, though, so he takes the hint and rolls, groaning, out of bed at last. His hair, when he sees it in the bathroom mirror, is sticking up at a truly alarming angle and everything below his waist feels disgusting. He is going to boil himself alive.

Washed and dried and combed out, he feels suitable for dealing with other humans again, and goes to reply to Richie only to find that Richie's texted him eight more times.

**bill  
BILL  
biiiiiill  
big bill  
billy boy wake up  
are u and mike busy right now its like nine in the mornign wtf  
hey big bill how hard is mikes lemonade**

That text is followed by a string of ten eggplant emojis and a line of water droplets, capped off with some kind of face sticking its tongue out. Bill frowns, takes a picture of himself flipping the camera off with Mike visible in the background, reading glasses perched on the end of his nose as he sits on the bed. He hits send.

**HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHG**

Bill is equal parts annoyed and relieved that Richie is doing well enough to make inappropriate jokes. If Richie ever stopped making jokes Bill might be tempted to call another emergency Losers meeting as an intervention or something. A moment later, Richie sends him a screencap of an exchange with Mike.

**level w me michael do they call him big bill for a reason cus i know its not his height**

**Yes**

**i fucking knew it**

**The size of his heart :)**

**you literally disgust me**

"Tell Trashmouth I should have said it's because of your ass," Mike says without looking up from his notebook, and Bill nearly drops his phone. When he regains his balance, he sits on the edge of the bed, turning his flushed face away from Mike.

 **Going to be in LA soon** , he writes. **When are you going back?**

 **idk** , Richie responds. **think i wore my folks out so i guess ill b on my way soon. leavin mike to the crawdads and mosquitos?**

**We're in Maryland right now, so it's crabs and… I don't know what else is in Maryland. But he's coming too. I kind of hoped we could see you when we're there. I have to do some stuff. Vote, get a divorce, you know.**

There's a long pause before Richie types, **oh fuck**

**You forgot too?**

**boss im gonna level w u im not even sure im registered  
i think i registered during the 2000 election to vote for the weed guy. do they cancel voter registrations if u have drug arrests**

**I can't tell if you're kidding. Please tell me you're kidding.**

**big chucks get ur big chucks right here  
it seems sort of pointless but one of u losers will probably finish the job the clown started on me if i skip it  
ok well i'll be home by november if u wanna crahs  
crsh*  
CRASH*  
house rules  
ONE no fucking on my couch  
that ones just for your own safety as much as id like to see how big big bill really is  
TWO no telling bev what my apartment is like  
i want her to think im an adult who knows how to decorate and dress myself**

**That ship has sailed.**

**fuck you too denbrough**

**I love you Trashmouth**

"Wanna sleep on Richie's nasty couch?" Bill turns back to see Mike firing off a text of his own, probably also to Richie, with a little smile on his face. Mike looks up, and Bill's heart clenches at how handsome he looks in his glasses. God, he's gone.

"I'm gonna kill that guy when I see him again," Mike says pleasantly.

—-

The spring after Georgie's disappearance, his family had held a funeral. Bill had not wanted his friends to attend, but their parents all forced them, and so there were Eddie and Richie and Stan, dressed in black and looking uncomfortable while his mother wept and they lowered an empty casket into the ground.

The casket was not _completely_ empty— some of Georgie's clothes, a photograph, and a stuffed animal were settled where a body ought to be in the child-sized coffin. It was all… it was just so _stupid_ , but when Bill had said that, his mother had paled, and his father had gone red and shouted at him, the first time he had raised his voice in months. They barely spoke to him anymore, let alone yelled at him. He escaped being scolded for the things that might have once gotten him sent to his room or grounded at the cost of being an entity his parents noticed at all.

They had exhumed the almost-empty coffin in fall, when the bodies of the missing children washed out of the drainpipes in clusters, tattered and bloated and broken. Bill's father had forbidden his mother from seeing what remained of their son, when the call had come from the police at last. They seemed surprised when Bill didn't argue with them that Georgie was really alive, that it was a lie, that they could still find him. They didn't know what Bill had seen, what he had done down there in the bowels of Derry. They placed Georgie's body into the little coffin that had been intended for him, with his Easter suit and his stuffed turtle, and they put him right back into the earth, where he'd been all along.

That time, he didn't tell his friends not to come, and their parents hadn't had to drag them out. Eddie wasn't there— they hadn't heard from him, and it was easy to imagine that his mother had locked him in his room for the rest of his life— but Richie and Stan were, along with Bev and Ben and Mike. Bev held his hand sweetly, and Ben said something thoughtful, and Richie said something thoughtless, and it was… Bill didn't know what it was. He'd already been through the worst of it, the ripping, tearing grief of finally knowing that Georgie was gone, and would never come back. He felt untethered, unable to cry but not sure what else there was to do now.

He ambled through town with the Losers, suit jackets tossed over shoulders and ties abandoned, walking them all home one by one. Ben and Bev were on the other side of town from Bill, and bid them goodbye first. Stan's house was the closest to Bill's, followed by Richie's, and then all the way out on the outskirts was the Hanlon family farm. It was a shorter trip by bike, but Bill was in no hurry to get back to his quiet house and its grieving occupants rattling around like pennies in a jar.

Mike, quiet and knowing, seemed to sense this. He paused at the gate, then looked at Bill intently for a moment. "You wanna come up?"

"Yeah, sure," Bill said. They didn't spend time at Mike's often. The couple times they had, Mike's uncle found a way to rope them into doing farmwork, which only Stan, Ben, and Bill had seemed to take seriously out of the group of them. Eddie begged off, citing a laundry list of allergies to both flora and fauna, and Richie had been banned from "helping" outright even though it was Bev's idea to climb into the hayloft and make a rope swing in the barn that had led to Richie's breaking the barn door clean off its hinges.

On their way up, Mike's grandfather had stopped them in the dining room. "Which one are you," he'd said.

"I'm B—Bill, sir." His grandfather's face had sobered, then, and he nodded knowingly.

"Well, you get on, now, and you stay out of trouble, boy," he had said, and Bill had taken it for the awkward affection it was. "Gotta be careful out there."

"Yes, sir," Bill had said, believing in his heart that the worst danger was dead and gone, now, and all the was left were the normal kinds of danger one might face in the world.

"You staying for dinner?" Bill didn't know. He looked at Mike, who smiled at him. Bill shouldn't have left his parents alone, they just came back from the funeral, for God's sake, but he also wasn't sure if they'd even notice. They knew he was walking his friends home. They couldn't fault him for staying over with one of them, right? He couldn't actually bring himself to care too much about what the consequences might be, so he agreed.

Mike had an attic bedroom littered with odds and ends from the farm, and from around Derry, license plates and pieces of old factory equipment and out-of-date calendars. Books and magazines were stacked high in milk crates by the walls. The quilt on his bed looked old and well-loved, patches embroidered by hand that seemed to depict some kind of family history Bill didn't have any context for but was fascinated by. Bill tossed his suit jacket over a chair, sitting cross-legged on the floor by Mike's little record player.

"You can sleep here, if you want, too," Mike said. "You can borrow a shirt of mine to sleep in."

"Thanks, Mikey," Bill said. "I… yeah, I think I… yeah." Mike just nodded, like Bill didn't even have to explain why he wanted to ditch his grieving parents on the day of his little brother's funeral. Bill was grateful, so he didn't question it. Mike went still and quiet, looking at Bill hesitantly.

"I… Can I show you something?"

Bill shrugged a shoulder. "Sure, you can show me whatever you want." Mike went to his knees next to the bed, sliding a trunk out from underneath. He flipped the latch and it creaked open, dust swirling through the air. From it, Mike retrieved a scrapbook, and with it, he went to sit by Bill on the floor. When he flipped it open, the headline glared out at Bill.

He'd never had a chance to talk to Mike about his parents.

"My grandfather made sure I had these. I was too young when it happened to really understand," he said. "He… he doesn't like to talk about it much, but he made sure I understood. What this place is, what it does." Mike gently closed the book and set it on top of a box of old records. His head dropped between his shoulders, his hands twisting in his lap. "I lied and told him I didn't really remember, but I do."

"I'm sorry," Bill said, knowing how hollow it felt to be on the receiving end.

"Bev told me she really doesn't remember her mom at all," Mike said. "I don't know if that's better or worse."

Bill tugged at a loose thread on his sock, wanting to hug Mike and wrestling with the urge. He'd feel condescended to, if someone did the same thing to him, but maybe not with one of the Losers. Definitely not with Mike.

"I d—don't wanna talk about it the way everyone else wants to talk about it. They all wuh—wanna say things like… I don't know, that he's with God now, or that he's an— an— an angel. It feels like stuff they think they're supposed to say." Bill swallowed, feeling tears pricking at his eyes for the first time in days. He blinked to fend them off. "But I do want to talk about him. I do. I just can't—"

Mike's arm settled warm and solid around Bill's shoulder. Mike talked, and he listened, and when it was Bill's turn, instead of feeling emptied, he felt the words filling him up like lines filling the pages of a book.

—

"Where do you want to go?"

Their bags are packed back up into the Buick. It's Bill's turn to drive, and he cranks the seat forward to bring his feet closer to the gas pedals like he always has to do after Mike's driven, damn him. Mike sips his coffee, black with two sugars.

"I thought we were going to LA?"

"Sure, eventually. We've got some time, though. Lot of country between here and there." Bill plugs their eight-hour end goal into his phone, while Mike consults the actual paper roadmap he bought at a bookstore before they left Maine. He is equal parts baffled and charmed by Mike Hanlon, who apparently enjoys the tactile quality of planning a road trip on a physical map. "We could make a detour to the Grand Canyon."

"You told me it was overrated," Mike says, glaring at him over the rim of his coffee cup.

"Well, _Vice_ once called me a self-satisfied shlock-peddler, so what do I know?" Mike looks at him, playfully concerned. Bill rolls his eyes. "You've never seen it! Maybe it's overrated, but you ought to be able to judge that for yourself. And you wanted to do it. But I don't know, maybe I'm an asshole and I changed your mind and you'd rather go see the world's biggest yarn ball."

"Only if they let you knit the world's biggest sweater with it," Mike says, and sets his coffee down in the cupholder. He bites his lip. "You don't have to do this."

"Do what?" Bill turns the key in the ignition, letting the heat kick on.

"Feel guilty." Mike's thumb brushes over the red line he had drawn on his map. Bill swallows around a lump in his throat. "You have to go back. I get that. But you don't have to worry so much about me."

"Too fucking bad," Bill says, setting his chin. He looks up at Mike, feeling the thud of his pulse in his temple. "You don't get to decide whether or not I care about you."

Mike looks slightly cowed, meeting Bill's eyes uncertainly. "I know it's complicated. I just don't want you to feel like you have to…" Mike shrugs. "Placate me."

"And I want you to understand that I'm not just gonna drop you somewhere and jet the first chance I get." Bill puts his hand over Mike's on top of the map. Mike stares down at it. "I love you. And yes, you love me too, and Losers stick together, and all of that. But like… I give a shit about you. Whatever that means, whatever we are, I will still give a shit about you. Nothing is going to stop me giving a shit about you."

Mike is still focused on their hands overlapping on his map. He breathes in slowly, his chest expanding with it.

"As far as romantic declarations go, that one was. Unique." He smiles slowly, like he's trying not to but can’t help himself.

"Writing isn't the same thing as oration, or else I'd be fucked," Bill says, and squeezes Mike's hand with his. Mike laughs outright at that, and twines his fingers briefly with Bill's before he has to pull away. "You've always taken care of me," he says, a little quieter. "Of all of us. Let me do the same thing for you."

Mike blinks, his eyes soft and catching the mid-morning light. "Okay."

Their planned midday stop is somewhere in West Virginia. Coastal Maryland gives way to cities and suburbs, and then to mountains thick with trees, red and orange and brown. Mike fishes through the glove compartment for a cassette, a relic of a mixtape that apparently belonged to his uncle when the car did, full of old rock and roll from the fifties and sixties. Mike always sings along to music, and the sound has become familiar and comforting.

There will be more rest stops for them, more mediocre meals and more surprisingly good ones. More transient sleeping conditions, hopefully a lot more sex. There will be tense conversations and bad memories, but good ones too. There's a lot of this country that Bill has seen, and much more that he hasn't, but even the old places feel new, looking at them through the lens of Mike seeing them for the first time. He wants to see it all with him. He can't wait to get there.

**Author's Note:**

> Richie isn't kidding.


End file.
